Chapter 5
My father did not ask for forgiveness. He asked if he could start showing up — small things first. He came to the bakery's one-year anniversary party two months later and stayed the whole evening, helping Marcus bus tables without being asked, which was such an unfamiliar sight that I had to step into the walk-in cooler for a few minutes to compose myself.
My mother's repair took longer, and is, honestly, still ongoing in a slow, partial way I've learned not to rush.
Clarissa and I are not close. We are, for the first time in our lives, honest — she sent a long message eight months after the bakery confrontation, admitting things about her own awareness of the imbalance that I hadn't expected her to ever say out loud, and acknowledging that being the favored child had cost her something too, a kind of fragility she was only beginning to recognize in her thirties.
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Thistle & Crumb celebrated its third anniversary last spring. My father was there, in an apron Marcus's mother had embroidered with his name as a joke that became a tradition. My mother came for an hour, stiffly at first, then less stiffly when she saw how the regular customers greeted me by name, how the staff I'd hired and trained looked at me the way I had always wanted, as a child, to be looked at by the people raising me.
I am not the afterthought anymore. I built the room I always wanted, and for the first time in my life, the people I love are showing up to stand in it — not because they finally remembered to, but because I finally stopped waiting for them to.
